NATO Plays Forceful New Role by Taking Sides Among Bosnian Serbs

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  For most of the 20 months since the war here ended, Bosnia watchers have grown accustomed to being told what Western peacekeepers could not do.

The NATO-led guardians of peace could not escort refugees returning home. They could not pursue war crimes suspects. They could not do anything about the paramilitary police who took charge of those two issues by blocking refugee returns and harboring alleged war criminals.

Some of those taboos are now being chiseled away. Most dramatically, NATO this week ousted the police hierarchy in Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serbs’ largest city, and replaced it with one considered more cooperative.

The confrontation with hard-liners led by the pariah former President Radovan Karadzic and the West’s support of his rival, Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, mark a significant escalation in NATO involvement. The drive is long overdue in the opinion of some, dangerously exploratory according to others.

“They [NATO members] have crossed a line,” an international official with extensive experience in the Balkans said Thursday. “And so far it’s without casualties. But they cannot just leave it here. They will have to keep up the momentum.”

The United States and its European allies have embarked on a new and risky strategy of deliberately “stirring things up,” in the words of one senior diplomat, to sow confusion in the ideologically riven Bosnian Serb half of this country. The goal, according to this view, is for the forces favored by the West to emerge victorious while those loyal to Karadzic become isolated.

All factions in Bosnia--the Muslims and Croats who control half the country and the Serbs who run the other half--have routinely violated or resisted elements of the December 1995 accords that ended the war. But the Serbs, who oppose reuniting Bosnia-Herzegovina into a single, multiethnic country, are widely seen as the most obstructionist.

And most of the die-hard resistance is traced to Karadzic, who the West says should be removed from the political arena and be forced to face genocide indictments issued against him by an international war crimes tribunal.

The strategy of stirring the Bosnian Serb pot is a risk-filled effort that could backfire at any moment.

Following the Banja Luka operation, a new spate of staunchly anti-West rhetoric was being aired on the Bosnian Serbs’ state-controlled Srpska Radio and Television network, or SRT. Plavsic was accused of collaborating with foreign occupation forces likened to the Nazis. On Thursday night, television showed black-and-white images of Nazis spliced with images of NATO soldiers.

The inflammatory language and imagery on SRT came even as Momcilo Krajisnik, the Bosnian Serb member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency, was promising U.S. special envoy Robert Gelbard that he would keep a lid on anti-West rhetoric.

In a challenge to Karadzic, aides to Plavsic said Thursday that she had given her rivals 72 hours to dismiss the principal editors at SRT. It was not clear how she would enforce the ultimatum.

Paramilitary police and the media constitute the two pillars of Karadzic’s power. Unwilling to confront Karadzic directly through arrest, international officials are instead chopping away at the underpinnings of his regime.

For weeks, international officials have rebuked SRT for its rhetoric, and on Thursday they again expressed outrage at the tone.

“We have virtually exhausted the legal options open to us,” said Duncan Bullivant, spokesman for the international Office of the High Representative. “We do not believe continued political pressure will achieve much.”

But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the civilian agencies in charge of enforcing the peace accords continue to disagree about how best to clamp down on the network. Jamming or shutting it down are seen in some quarters as too heavy-handed. And the Bosnian Serb hard-liners, clustered around Karadzic in their headquarters in the town of Pale, would certainly react strongly to losing their all-important propaganda tool.

“Right now the Serbs are behaving,” said another international official based in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “But if you crack down on SRT they lose their main PR tool, and that would be serious. Pale isn’t going to start a war over Banja Luka. But pulling the plug on SRT--that will hurt, and there’s no guarantee they’d take it as calmly as they are now.”

For the West’s new strategy to be successful, diplomats say, it will have to be sustained. Police beyond Banja Luka will have to be brought into line.

Alexander Ivanko, the United Nations spokesman in Sarajevo, said a number of police chiefs in other parts of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb half of Bosnia, have expressed a willingness to cooperate with international officials. But overall, the Bosnian Serb security apparatus is divided.

Krajisnik went on television Thursday night to urge police to disobey Plavsic. “We waged war without a single drop of Serbian blood shed [by fellow Serbs],” he said, “and now a high-ranking official is putting you in a situation to shoot one another.”

Currently, U.S. policymakers are paying more attention to Bosnia than they have been in some time. Other international officials worry about the strength of this resurgent commitment, however, given the fickle nature of Washington’s policies here.

U.S. diplomats claim they have a clear strategy, backed by the vigorous interest of newly focused governments in Washington, London and Bonn, in particular. But several officials conceded that there is great uncertainty about how events will unfold, even a danger of events spiraling out of control toward a violent denouement. There is a sense that international officials are making up the rules as they go.

After first saying they were confident that Plavsic’s decision to appoint new police chiefs was legal under peace accords, international officials on Thursday said support for Plavsic’s moves was more “moral” than legal. “It was the right thing to do,” Bullivant of the Office of the High Representative said.

Western officials also support Plavsic’s call for early parliamentary elections in October, but they could not overcome Russian resistance at a meeting Thursday in Vienna of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the body that would have to conduct the elections.

For the elections to be held at all, it is likely that Western governments would have to exercise a prominent role in the conducting of the poll, as Plavsic’s rivals would be expected to boycott it.